Bowery

The Bowery is a street and neighborhood in southern Manhattan, New York City. The street borders Canal Street and Chinatown to the south, the Lower East Side to the east, and Little Italy to the west, and its name comes from the Dutch word bouwerij, derived from an antiquated Dutch word for "farm". In the 17th century, the area contained several large farms, but it ceased to be a farming area by the 1800s, becoming an elegant and broad boulevard as the wealthy moved into the area. By the time of the American Civil War, however, the mansions and shops had given way to low-brow concert halls, brothels, German beer gardens, pawn shops, and flophouses, and it became the eastern border of the Five Points slum. By the 1890s, the Bowery was a center of prostitution, and it was also home to several early gay bars. From 1878 to 1955, the Bowery's streets were further darkened by the Third Avenue El train, and it was filled with employment agencies, cheap clothing and knick-knack stores, cheap moving-picture shows, cheap lodging-houses, cheap eating-houses, cheap saloons by 1919. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was an impoverished area, and it was known as New York's "Skid Row" from the 1940s to the 1970s, being full of disaffiliated alcoholics and homeless people. After the 1970s, the city dispersed the vagrant population of the Bowery, and the Lower East Side underwent revival.